I saw some old documents on internet but they are very outdated. I was wondering if the newer versions of Home assistant are still capable of running on a Raspberry Pi Zero W?
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Hi welcome to the forum!
Have you searched here: Search results for '"raspberry pi zero"' - Home Assistant Community
You can certainly attempt it, but I would NOT recommend it. There just is not enough compute power or bandwidth available from the Zero W.
HAOS doesn’t support the Zero for a good reason.
You could probably install HA Container on a Pi, but whether it’d run with such little RAM and CPU…
Oh, and first start, and any upgrades, will likely take 12-24 hours.
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FWIW, I have HA 2025.3.1 running good on original Pi Zero W (armhf) for weeks.
Installed Alpine linux 3.21.3, with ssh, docker, mosquitto and tailscale (for remote access), then pulled-in latest docker armhf image (that can take about 20mn to install).
Added a few HACS plugins and blueprints, disabled most logging: running fine to drive several sensors and HVAC, in about 315 MB of RAM total.
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I’m looking for the cheapest way to get Home Assistant working for a friend with a few lights and Harmony.
I have a bunch of Pi Zero W units that I’m no longer using as well as a bunch of Zero 2 W that I haven’t yet found a use for.
I’m looking for the cheapest way to set this up even if the performance is less than stellar. The goal is to get it working.
Sounds like running it via Alpine isn’t a great plug 'n play experience, but checking the Raspberry Pi Imager app, I was able to install an image for the Zero 2 W.
I tried booting, and it didn’t work. It did run the OS, but it was at an HAOS> shell. It complained about some other stuff. I should’ve taken a screenshot.
The lowest-end device I got it to run on so far is the Pi 3B+. I haven’t tried the original 3B, but I do own one.
Hi,
Indeed, there’s a bit of learning curve to setup and leverage Alpine, but this is a great distribution for memory constrained devices: to keep things thin and optimal, using Alpine under command-line (and via ssh) is recommended: home-assistant will anyway serve it’s complete UI to remote clients.
It would be out of scope here to fully detail how to install, but you may find a lot of useful information on Alpine wiki.
Summary
Note: talking about plain Alpine install here (with home-assistant container), not HAOS (which happens to be somehow constructed on top of Alpine, but does not seem available for armhf)
Basically, after base Alpine install (system disk mode), you should add docker package and then pull-in home-assistant stable image (be patient) via command-line (follow generic linux guide on how to setup home-assistant docker install). Then tell docker to start home-assistant and you are done.
Within home-assistant GUI settings once started, you may want to severely limit/disable logging to avoid SD fill-up and wear…(check home-assistant doc for that)
If needed, you may want to also run mosquitto MQTT server on same machine, and tailscale for remote access (adding related packages with apk tool).
I may write a How-To on Alpine wiki at some point, but feel free to do so once you get it working before.
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